Please remain standing and turn to hymn number 32, Great is Thy Faithfulness. ♪ Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father ♪ There is no shadow with thee. Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not. As thou hast been, thou forever wilt be. Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have need in Thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me. Summer and winter, ever strange I've met forests, sun, moon, and stars in their courses above. ♪ Joined with all nature in manifold witness ♪ ♪ To thy great faithfulness, mercy and love ♪ ♪ Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness ♪ Morning by morning, new mercies I see. All I have needed, life and death provided. Faith is my faithfulness, all unto thee. ♪ Be sad and dormant ♪ ♪ Find no dear presence to cheer and to guide ♪ ♪ Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow ♪ ♪ Blessings of life with 10,000 beside ♪ ♪ Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness ♪ ♪ Morning by morning new mercies I see ♪ ♪ All I have need in thy hand hath provided ♪ You can be comfortable, but not too comfortable. Let's join our hearts together in prayer. Gracious God, we have the privilege of entering your sanctuary this morning. We thank you for that freedom, that liberty that we enjoy as Christians in America. We pray that those freedoms would long endure and continue. Father, we pray now that you would open our eyes, open our ears, remove the calluses from our heart. May the word of God penetrate our hearts and minds and lives. to the end that you would be glorified. We pray in Jesus name. Amen. I invite you to turn in your Bibles place to Psalm 13. It's an honor to be invited to preach here. It's even a greater honor to be invited back. You're invited someplace and you leave and you say, you know, I hope I didn't split the church, oh Lord. So here we are again. Psalm 13, hear the word of God. How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes or I will sleep in death. And my enemy will say, I have overcome him. And my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust. in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise for he has been good to me." The word of God for the people of God. Pastor Campbell, when he asked me to come and preach, he said, you can wear your robe if you wish. You don't have to. It's up to you. I decided not to wear my Robe, I did contemplate for a while wearing a hazmat suit. However, I was thinking of all of the social niceties that we now have to invoke, keeping distance from each other, not shaking hands, that kind of thing. I guess nose rubbing is out for a while. Somebody needs to tell the Eskimos about that. Well, it is my honor to worship with you this morning and lead us in worship. The word worship comes from the Greek word proskuneo, which means to bow low. And we do that physically on our knees sometimes, certainly we do it mentally in our hearts. You know, it's tempting to say, let's leave all our anxieties at the door and enter the worship of the Lord. May I suggest, however, that we don't leave these fears and burdens and anxieties at the door, but bring them with us here into the sanctuary and lay them at the altar. They are too heavy for us to carry, but the Lord will carry them for us. We've already done this silently, but I thought it would be fitting that we take a few moments silently to do just that. Ask the Lord to take our anxieties and these burdens that weigh us down and give them to the Lord. Let's pray silently. Amen. Psalm 9.9 says, the Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. What a great verse in which to meditate in the times in which we live. The Bible tells us in Psalm 119, verse 26, confession is good for the soul. And we know that that's true. The King James Version says open confession is good for the soul. You know, there's a big difference between going into our private prayer closet without anyone observing us and pouring out our misdeeds, our sins before God, That's one thing, but to do it openly in a forum like this, to expose ourselves and confess our sins, that's quite another. So who wants to be first? There's another version, another take on this phrase, this biblical phrase, confession is good for the soul. Confession is good for the soul, but bad for the reputation. Well, this morning I want to come clean. I remember vividly standing in church one Sunday morning, about 20 years ago, singing the words that were broadcast on the screen. It is well with my soul. Well, it didn't take very long for me to come to my senses and stop singing because it was not well with my soul. I was singing a lie. I was angry. I was bitter in my mind. I was plotting revenge towards certain people. I was taking pleasure, dreaming and scheming about the misery that they were going to endure. I was enjoying it. But it was not well with my soul. And I had to stop singing. I couldn't wait for the song to stop so I could sit down and just kind of stew in my juices. Now I should clarify, in that moment I was not questioning my salvation or my right standing with God. I knew that because of the perfect obedience of the Son of God all the way to the cross, and for his vicarious atonement, shedding his blood in payment of my sin, that God the Father viewed me as righteous because he viewed me through the blood of Christ. I had right standing with God. I didn't stop being a child of God, adopted into the family of God, but I was a child of God in a strained relationship. Now, in these past few moments of self-disclosure, I suspect that there's someone here, maybe more than one person, who's nodding inwardly. You've been there too. You have felt what has been called the dark night of the soul. Soren Kierkegaard is usually credited with that phrase, the dark night of the soul, but actually it goes back far beyond Kierkegaard to the 16th century Spanish mystic, John of the cross, who wrote a poem, the dark night of the soul. But some of you have been there, you felt the dark night of the soul. You wondered if you would see spiritual daylight once more. If you have experienced that despair, or perhaps if you are there right now. Let me say you're in good company. If there's truth in the adage, misery loves company, take heart and look around because we're all surrounded by hurting people to one degree or another. and church, the sanctuary of the Lord is the right place for us. This is where we should be this morning. St. Augustine, the great Bishop of Hipporegius in North Africa in the early fifth century remarked that the church is rather like a hospital. It's full of sick and wounded people who are desperately hoping to be healed. It's no accident that the medieval name for the clergy, the priest, was the curate, from the Latin word cura, meaning care. The calling, you see, of the minister was the care and cure of souls. Of course, ministers don't themselves cure anyone. Rather, they point us to the wounded healer, Christ, who was wounded for us. Isaiah 53 5 reminds us that by his stripes we were healed. It's been said the church is where beggars tell other beggars where to find a piece of bread, a piece of spiritual bread that heals and relieves the hunger of the soul. In Psalm 13 that we read a moment ago, we will see that David suffered what we could call the dark night of the soul. In this psalm, David foreshadows Christ. David is a type of Christ. In biblical interpretation or hermeneutics, we have this model known as type and antitype. For example, Jesus is the second Adam. Adam is the type and Jesus is the antitype. Adam failed in the garden, but Jesus gave mankind another chance. He's the antitype. He's the second Adam. And David here is a type of Christ. On the cross, Jesus cried out, quoting Psalm 22, one, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? That's what David is feeling. God the Father is not uninvolved with pain and misery. He sent his only son to suffer and die for our sins. I want us to look at two passages of scripture. before we get to Psalm 13. The first one is Old Testament prophetic, it's messianic text, and then a fulfillment of that very text in the New Testament. And what we will see is a close relationship between suffering and redemption. This is clearly seen in the suffering servant passage of Isaiah 52 and 53. The son of God is innocent, yet he suffered on the behalf of the guilty. And through his suffering, others will be healed spiritually. Turn, if you would, in your Bibles, please, to Isaiah 53. Isaiah 53, we'll read verses three through six, and then verse 12. I'll pause, I hear pages rustling, so we'll pause. Isaiah 53, verses three through six. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain. like one from whom people hide their faces. He was despised and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all, in verse 12. Therefore, I will give him a portion among the great and will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors. Now, most commentators see this as a prophetic text, a messianic text that speaks of Christ. One of my former colleagues at Erskine Seminary was a Yale Divinity School and Princeton Divinity School graduate. And he was telling me he was in some Old Testament course and they had to I'm not sure if it was an Old Testament course. It was a Bible course, but I'm not sure what it was. In any event, they had to make some, write some paper in regards to Christ, and they were told, if you use the book of Isaiah, you can't get higher than a B on your paper. Don't be trying to pull out some text from Isaiah to make the case that you want to make about Jesus, because this professor did not believe that this textbook of Christ. So I said to my colleague, I said, what did you do? He said, I got a B. The New Testament writers believe this prophecy that we just read in Isaiah was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Turn to nearly the end of the New Testament, first Peter, Chapter 1, 1 Peter 2, verses 21 to 25. To this you were called because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. He committed no sin, no deceit was found in his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate when he suffered. He made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. You see that quotation from Isaiah 53, 5. For you were like sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the shepherd, an overseer of your souls. So Peter believed that Jesus fulfilled this messianic text in Isaiah 53. The sufferings of Christ on the cross were not pointless. They're not accidental, but they are the mysterious and the wonderful means by which God was working out the salvation of his people. Because we must remember there is no resurrection without suffering. and the cross. In a few weeks, we'll be celebrating the resurrection of Christ. But you know, his death was necessary for us to celebrate the resurrection. This is the message of Romans 8, 17. We share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. Suffering is a mystery that causes anguish to a lot of Christians. It seems to call into question the love of God, the goodness of God. The suffering of Jesus on the cross does not explain suffering, but does reveal that God himself is willing to allow himself to suffer the pain and suffering that his creation experiences. So God became the man of suffering so that we can enter into the mystery of death and resurrection. This message is crucial in order to heal the injury of the soul that you may be feeling, or recover from the dark night of the soul that is weighing upon you. There's a famous saying about the medical profession that is fitting here, only the wounded physician can heal. And Christ was our wounded physician, if you will. The God who offers to heal the wounds of our sins has himself been wounded by sinners. We put him there. In effect, we stood at the foot of the cross. It was our sin that nailed him to the cross. There are two important points here. First, not only is a Christian response to suffering important to those who've suffered an injury of the soul, but secondly, the affirmation of God's sovereignty is also essential in the healing process. This morning in our call to worship, we heard a powerful reminder of the sovereignty of God. Every serious Christian I've ever met wants to affirm the sovereignty of God in theory, but when the rubber meets the road, we are all varying degrees of inconsistency regarding sovereignty. You see, we love to proclaim the sovereignty of God in good times and in times of triumph. Perhaps a relative of ours is very sick and we pour our hearts out to God and pray for healing and our loved one is healed and we say, God is good and he is good. But you know, God is good whether that person is healed or not. That's the hard side of sovereignty. If we truly believe that God is sovereign, all wise, all knowing, infinite in his mercy, goodness, and truth, then we must also accept the hard truths of sovereignty. God is not just in the rainbow and the sunshine and gentle breezes. He's also in the tornado and in the hurricanes. and in the coronavirus, because we live in a fallen world, and we're simply reaping the whirlwind. For his own purposes and his own glory, he is in the events of life that you and I, in our finite creaturely perspective, rightly call tragedy. But the hard truth of sovereignty is that in the economy of God, there really is no such thing as tragedy, not as God views it. Oftentimes we don't understand the ways of God, but in our sorrow and in our tears, we must still trust and say, God is good. God is good all of the time. Not just in the good times. This is the message for hurting people. This is the message of the Bible. Think of Job in the book of Job. Job understood the hard truths of sovereignty. In the first chapter of Job, we read, Job was the greatest man among all of the people of the East. seven sons, three daughters, and in a time when wealth was measured by livestock, Job owned 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 donkeys. Job could not understand why his entire world collapsed. He lost his possessions. He saw, as the rest of us saw this week, our 401ks going south. Job was experiencing this in his own way. He lost his possessions and many of those that he loved. Now, Job was counseled by his wife with these thoughts. Why don't you just curse God and die? Job 2.9. Well, despite that advice, however well intended, Job didn't take the advice. In the very next verse, Job is recorded as saying to his wife, what you're saying is foolish. What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God? And shall we not receive evil? Regarding sovereignty, we see in the book of Job, Frankly, that suffering falls within the sweep of God's sovereignty. God gave Satan permission to afflict Job. It's not by accident. It's not by fate. It's not a bad roll of the dice. It's all in the hand of God. In the Old Testament, King David suffered from the same sorrow and sadness and despair, even though he's the most powerful man in Israel. In fact, fully one third of the Psalms are lament. They are complaint by David who's being honest before Almighty God. We could choose from any number of Psalms to illustrate this I've chosen Psalm 13, written by David under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Now we know when we think of David that much of his grief and sorrow was self-inflicted. It was his own willful disobedience, his own sin as an adulterer and a murderer in arranging the murder of Uriah. And yet David is called a man after God's own heart. Now in this short Psalm of six verses, Psalm 13, David reaches the depth of near despair. It is a desperate plea for deliverance. Martin Luther calls the mood of this prayer, the state in which hope despairs. It seems in verses one and two that God is not just hidden, but God has purposely withdrawn himself and cannot be found. Remember when you were a kid and played hide and seek? If you're an adult and play hide and seek, we probably need to talk afterward. But imagine playing hide and seek with God. God will always find you. If God does not want to be found, you can't find him. God will win. Well, God is not just withdrawn, he's not just hidden, he's purposely withdrawn. And it leads David to a fear of abandonment. David is in this hostile, God-forsaken country of lament. In fact, he's living in the capital city called Despair. And four times in Psalm 13, David asks the question, how long How long, oh God? You and I can endure something if we know it'll be a short duration. If there's light at the end of the tunnel, we can hang in there. That's what we're hoping and praying for in this environment. We don't know how long this crisis will last, but we hope that things will get better. How long, oh Lord? Without divine intervention, David can only anticipate defeat and death. The image here is one of imminent collapse because God is absent. My wife, Susan, and I, after she finished law school and I finished seminary, we moved to Florida. I began teaching. We were there for four years. And then we moved here in 1987. I began teaching at Southern Wesleyan University. I was on their faculty for 14 years. And in that year, 1987, one of the, another new faculty member was a professor in business and accounting, Jim Bowen. He became my best friend and is still my best friend. And Jim's wife, Sharon, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. It's the disease that eventually took her life, leaving a husband and three children. After her diagnosis, she continued taking classes at SWU as long as she could until physically she was no longer able to do that. Throughout this ordeal, Jim, her husband, and Sharon, and probably their kids, ask themselves every day. Why? Why me? Why am I suffering? Why did this happen to our family? The kids are probably praying, oh Lord, why is mommy dying? Sharon probably prayed those prayers. Lord, I'm in my mid-thirties. Why am I dying? Chairman was enrolled in a class at Southern Wesleyan University, basic Christian beliefs class. Among the required textbooks were two written by Paul Little, published by University Press. The first title was, Know What You Believe. You've probably read it. Know What You Believe. And a companion volume, Know Why. you believe. So those two books, among others, Know What You Believe and Know Why You Believe, they were commonly known on campus as the What and the Why books. One morning in the business of getting ready to leave the house and go to class, Sharon could not find all of her books and she called out to her family to help her find one of her books. She said, I've got my what, but I can't find my why. Now, isn't that a good commentary on life? We're living in the what, but we can't always find our why. We don't have good answers. Why are we suffering? Why does God seem absent? People are asking, why am I dying? Why do bad things happen to so-called good people? As Christians, as Bible readers, we know there are no good people. Know why you believe. But sometimes we can't seem to find our why. Perhaps this morning, you are distant from God. Your relationship with God has grown cold. God seems absent. I heard a story of a husband and wife been married 20 some years and they're driving down the road and the wife says to her husband who's driving, she said, look at us. You know, when we were dating, we basically occupied one space in the car. But now we're hugging our respective doors. You're all the way over there. I'm all the way over here. Look at us. The husband is not saying anything. Finally, he says, I didn't move. Now, I'm not blaming this on the woman, though. That's very tempting. And she is the one who moved, by the way. But if you're feeling distant or estranged from God this morning, remember God, God has not moved. God is still behind the wheel. God, the creator of the universe, the redeemer, the sustainer, the generous God of grace has not moved. And the wonderful news of this short psalm is that it concludes in an unanticipated expression of trust and joy and praise. It is a bookend psalm of lament and despair, but ending with joy and praise. The tenor of the psalm changes dramatically in verse 5. From agony to ecstasy. Notice the sorrow in my heart, verse 2, has been replaced by a heart that shall rejoice. Verse 4. Whereas the enemy has been exalted over me, verse 2, now in verse 6, God has dealt bountifully with me. The ambiguity and the complexity of this psalm accurately reflects the ambiguity and the complexity of a life of faith. As people of faith, we will always find it necessary to pray, how long, oh Lord, even as we simultaneously profess that the Lord has been good to me, the Lord has dealt bountifully with me. Psalm 19 reminds us that there is no following Jesus without bearing the cross, Mark 8.34. And those who lose their life for Jesus' sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it, Mark 8.35. We can conclude on the authority of God's word that your mourning will turn to dancing. In your leisure this afternoon, read Psalm 30, verses 11 and 12. Your mourning, your lament can turn to dancing. Turn to the father who will never forget his covenant obligations. Listen to, in closing, to the last two verses of Psalm 13. But I trust in your unfailing love, My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord for he has been good to me. Because we worship and serve a generous God, I hope that you can say this morning, it is well with my soul. We're going to sing that in a moment. Let's first join together in prayer. Our gracious God, take this psalm and impress the truths on our hearts. Yes, we will face trial. Yes, we will bear the cross. We will cry out, how long, O Lord? But we also conclude with joy that you have dealt bountifully with us. And you will, because you are our covenant God. This is addressed to Lord in all caps, the covenant name for God, the covenant keeping God who always keeps his promises to his covenant people. And so we rejoice and we say amen.